Attila Lendvai <att...@lendvai.name> writes: > here's an approximate list of what's consuming/training my > frustration-tolerance with Guix: > > - debbugs and related tooling. i could live with an email based > workflow, but whatever is documented, or at least whatever i have > put together locally, is very inefficient. the chore vs. coding > ratio is low. > > - large backlog. contributions somtimes even fall through the cracks. > > - strict adherence to changelog style commit messages without a > clearly worded and documented argument about why it's worth the > effort in 2023. whenever 'C' fails to add an entry to the commit > message in Emacs, i groan out loud.
This is almost exactly my list. I strongly suspect that the issue with the backlog and lost issues has a lot to due with debbugs just not cutting the mustard. I've got something like 6 patches waiting, all have been sitting around for many months. They'll get some committer attention and then it drops off and nothing happens. To me, that sounds like people lose track of it, because debbugs doesn't allow people to stay easily on top of patches they're interested in. Possibly we need some kind of concept of patch stewards that can see something through. I have more things I want to do with Guix, but it's tough, because I have to maintain each of my patches separately in different branches, so that I can rebase them as necessary and resubmit them cleanly if necessary, or simply just to work on them when issues come up. But my master branch pulls in each of them, so any time I need to pull, I've got a list of things (switch to every branch, rebase, fix if necessary, switch back to master, reset to origin/master, then merge all the branches I'm maintaing). Adding more branches on top of the ones I already have is just too much. Regarding the GNU changelog commits, I really dislike them. They're redundant busy-work as far as I'm concerned. And while I'd like to say they're no longer necessary, because we have better tooling, I'm old enough to be familiar with hand editing RCS and CVS files to fix them. And even back then, in the dark days, only GNU used that format. Just like today. So I'd argue they've always been pointless busy-work. I really like Guix, I like what it promises, I love the community around it, and that's what keeps me here. But it's a deeply frustrating experience to try to contribute to. I've been a contributor in various forms to a great many free and open source software projects over the years, and Guix is easily one of the worst in that regard. -bjc
